September is a time to grow wistful, and I wish I could lean on a bench into E.B. White’s shoulder and whisper right now how “I understand, old man. I understand.”

Maybe I’d put an arm around his neck and we’d go down one last time to the lake of our dreams, a place that can only be captured in words, where the sound of cool water lapping against the sides of cedar gunwales is symphony.

I can’t, though. Elwyn Brooks White has been gone now for nearly 30 years, the man you probably know only as the gentleman who authored “Charlotte’s Web.” Or, if you ever had trouble with commas, and, who hasn’t, co-authored "The Elements of Style," with a partner named Strunk.

My heart honors White, however, as the creator of one of the world’s greatest essays ever.

“Once More To The Lake” is only 2,855 words in length, but for me, it has always spoken volumes about summertime, about reminiscing over bittersweet elements that can never be again, about the melodrama contained in a July thunderstorm.

I have read it so many times that I have lost track, and I can’t say that about anything else I have ever read, unless you count the inside of my wedding band, because that’s where my marriage date is engraved, gratefully.

It would take an entirely larger piece of jewelry to memorialize White’s “Lake” essay similarly, and if I were a richer man, I might ponder the possibility. It’s that good.

He published it in August of 1941, a man of 41 years at the time. In it, he recalls going with his father to a camp on a lake in Maine “one summer, along about 1904,” when he would have been just shy of 5.

It’s more poetry than prose, with soft reminiscing, and then the stark realization that as a grown man, he can’t tell if the dragonfly he’s seeing is buzzing him in the present tense, or the same that haunted him four decades earlier.

Because I don’t want to ruin it for you and because I absolutely want you to read it for yourself (just Google the title, and voila!), I’ll just give you a taste here:

“Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fadeproof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottagers with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp, and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the postcards that showed things looking a little better than they looked.”

My own memory of “lake” is actually a composite, and not too much unlike the nirvana White describes. It features the dunes of Lake Michigan, the fishing boats lined up for rent at Wabasis, the romance of Little and Big Glen lakes in Leelanau County.

In my summers past, in going once more to my lakes, I can still taste the bloody nose from a fistfight in Grand Haven, see the first girl I ever liked standing against the lighthouse, hear my long-gone father’s voice coaching me on how to bait a cane pole.

“Once More To The Lake” surfaced for me just the other day when a friend of mine – a teacher – reached out to me in an e-mail.

The tone of it was both sad and mildly angry.

“I have a new textbook, and it doesn’t have ‘Once More To The Lake’ in it,” she wrote me.

Instead, her new book offered three alternatives – stories all authored by women of color.

"I get what the textbook company is trying to do,” my friend continued, “but White’s story is so beautiful. Damn it! I guess we’ll be reading ‘Don’t Call Me A Hot Tamale’ instead. Argh!”

My friend and I both agree completely that today’s students need to be exposed more and more to important writers who are women and who are black and Hispanic and Asian and Native American.

And there are poignant lessons to be learned in a piece like Judith Ortiz Cofer’s narrative ‘Tamale’ essay, which helps people understand that pigeonholing people can be akin to practicing racism.

But we also both agree that “Once More To The Lake” is one of the most exquisite pieces ever written about summertime, about looking back on a life lived, of the painful constant that is the inescapable passing of time.